Gimkit Don’t Look Down launched in October 2023 as the platform’s first 2D platformer game mode. Players climb a vertical obstacle course by answering quiz questions — correct answers earn the energy needed to move and jump. The first player to reach 1,000 meters wins. This guide covers how the mode works, host settings, strategies, and how to use it in class. What Is Gimkit Don’t Look Down? Don’t Look Down is a vertical platformer built into Gimkit’s standard game picker. ...

Nicholas Carlini , a research scientist at Anthropic, reported at the [un]prompted AI security conference that he used Claude Code to find multiple remotely exploitable security vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, including one that sat undiscovered for 23 years. Nicholas was astonished at how effective Claude Code has been at finding these bugs: We now have a number of remotely exploitable heap buffer overflows in the Linux kernel. I have never found one of these in my life before....

As we see LLMs churn out scads of code, folks have increasingly turned to Cognitive Debt as a metaphor for capturing how a team can lose understanding of what a system does. Margaret-Anne Storey thinks a good way of thinking about these problems is to consider three layers of system health : Technical debt lives in code. It accumulates when implementation decisions compromise future changeability. It limits how systems can change. Cognitive debt lives in people. It accumulate...

In 2025 I built a browser extension that adds an edit button to your browser . The edit button pages if a page either has: A rel=edit link; A custom edit link set in the extension preferences, or; A link with an anchor like “edit page” (only available if you enable the setting, since this is a heuristic). Back when I built the extension, I added in a keyboard shortcut to open the edit link associated with a page. On Mac, the shortcut is Command + Shift + E. I forgot all about this shortcu...

Last summer, a wedding photographer walked begrudgingly into a physics laboratory outside Rome. Feeling uninspired by the intricate machinery around him, he decided to turn off the lights. “I wanted to create a world that was a bit more intimate,” said the photographer, Marco Donghia. He had been brought into the lab to participate in a photography contest by his sister Raffaella Donghia… Source Last summer, a wedding photographer walked begrudgingly into a physics laboratory outside Ro...

Technically it was yesterday, but it’s still the 31st of March in some timezones, so I’ll slide this post in on a technicality! To all my beautiful trans friends: I see you, and I’m proud. You’re the current punching bag of dullards desperate for distractions, and yet you persevere and remain true to yourselves. You are the kindest people I’ve ever met. Thank you for being a part of my life. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-01. Technically it was yesterday, but it’s still ...

As with other such posts on my blog, this is not sponsored in any way, I just write about the things I personally use and think are worth sharing. In the process of rewriting my blog I changed how I host my videos. I currently have two posts with embedded short videos: How to make a timelapse with a Raspberry Pi I started using ESPhome and now I have a local smarthome Previously I stored the video files in the CDN's storage (first Cloudfront, then Bunny CDN, here is the blog post ab...

April Fools Day is somewhat of a legendary day among nerds. Historically it's been when the nerds at GMail introduced GMail Custom Time , where you could interrupt causality by making GMail look like you sent a message before it was actually sent. It actually worked. Sometimes this gets taken too far and the joke falls flat, causing a lot more problems than would exist if the joke never happened in the first place. Incidents like this have resulted in many companies just putting in po...

Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs 1 . It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11 wireless network. Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs 1 . It came with an AirPort card—...

Back in 1985, computer scientist Peter Naur wrote “Programming as Theory Building” . According to Naur - and I agree with him - the core output of software engineers is not the program itself, but the theory of how the program works . In other words, the knowledge inside the engineer’s mind is the primary artifact of engineering work, and the actual software is merely a by-product of that. This sounds weird, but it’s surprisingly intuitive. Every working programmer knows that you can...

I spend a lot of time reading about the nature of technological progress, and I’ve found that the literature on technology is somewhat uneven. If you want to learn about how some particular technology came into existence, there’s often very good resources available. Most major inventions, and many not-so-major ones, have a decent book written about them. Some of my favorites are Crystal Fire (about the invention of the transistor), Copies in Seconds (about the early history of Xerox), an...

Just testing Just testing Just testing

A couple of weeks ago we took a little break. The first adults-only break since my daughter was born. For that reason, we decided to do something that was quite close to home. I am still was quite nervous about being far away from her and I didn’t want to go abroad because of her seizures. So I figured that we should stay near London and a small train journey away. Ideally, a train journey that wouldn’t be too expensive and that we could go on the day without price difference. Since we’re ...

I blogged about Pope Leo XIV  here . Pope Leo XIV has an undergraduate degree in mathematics. He saw my post and asked for my help with his latest encyclical.  LEO: Let's have lunch together at Popeyes. BILL: Why Popeyes? LEO: The name is Pope-yes so I get a discount. BILL: Your treat. [We met at Pope-yes and had the following discussion.] LEO: I am working on an encyclical to resolve the tension between miracles in the Bible and modern science.  BILL: What's the issue? LEO: The Bible has mir...

Personal coding and teaching projects I’m currently using Claude to explore: Name Notes asimpy discrete event simulator using async / await calls discrete event simulation of a call center change workshop on organizational change chart.xkcd XKCD-style charts in Python and JavaScript datadrag drag-and-drop dataflow for data science dsdx distributed systems design by example forma formative assessment widgets for the browse...

Switch, map of functions, and interface registry for dispatching in Go. Switch, map of functions, and interface registry for dispatching in Go.

If I’ve been quiet on this blog for a while, it’s because I’ve been filling my hours with a lot of RPG design: D&D, A5E, Pathfinder, and, increasingly, Draw Steel (I’ve been doing freelance work on the game back from when it was MCDM RPG). And now it’s official! I’m starting a job as Draw Steel line developer at MCDM. I’m incredibly proud that this amazing company is letting me play with their toys. I have tons and tons of praise for MCDM that I basically can’t say now, becau...

I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines . It's available on YouTube , Spotify , and Apple Podcasts . Here are my highlights from our conversation, with relevant links. The November inflection point Software engineers as bellwethers for other information workers Writing code on my phone Responsible vibe coding Dark Factories and ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anthony Nelzin-Santos, whose blog can be found at z1nz0l1n.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Bonjour ! I’m a militant wayfarer,...

tl;dr; I cut 3.2 GB of memory usage from our Python web apps using five techniques: async workers, import isolation, the Raw+DC database pattern, local imports for heavy libraries, and disk-based caching. Here are the exact before-and-after numbers for each optimization. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been ruthlessly focused on reducing memory usage on my web apps, APIs, and daemons. I’ve been following the one big server pattern for deploying all the Talk Python web apps, APIs, backgr...

Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club : an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Please enjoy this true story, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon! One Friday night a few months ago, my family and I sat down to relax and enjoy a TV show on our streaming platform of choice. The subscription was a perk of one of our credit cards, and we had been satisfied customers for several months. This time was different. Instead of a "Conti...

"Intellectuals and Society" by Thomas Sowell - a collection of essays in which Sowell criticizes "intellectuals", by which he mostly means left-leaning thinkers and opinions. Interesting, though certainly very biased. This book is from 2009 and focuses mostly on early and mid 20th century; yes, history certainly rhymes. "The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics" by Ben Buchanan - a pretty good overview of some of the the major cyber-attacks done by states in th...

It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from what you usually do. For example, last year I talked about The best introductory video games for non-gamers. This year I’m picking a fight. This is “New York” Pizza (NYP): (source) Flat pizza, soft bottom, hard crust, foldable wedges. It’s the archetypical American pizza style and probably your pizza emoji. It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, excep...